In a study published recently in the British Medical Journal, Ikuko Funatogawa and colleagues from Tokyo, looked at a cohort of Japanese women born from 1930 to 1999. The study included over 76 000 women, aged between one year and 25. They found that, over time, body mass index decreased slightly in pre-school children, increased in children and adolescents and then decreased slightly among young adults.
However, they also found that more recent cohorts were more overweight as children, but thinner as young women and the increments in body mass index among children in recent cohorts were larger than among those in older cohorts.
